With Qt 4.6 the Finnish mobile giant has made its developer platform Symbian-compatible. Furthermore, it now adds Windows 7, Mac OS X 10.6 and the upcoming Maemo 6 to its list of supported platforms.

Nokia also promises community support for the two real-time operating systems QNX and VxWorks. The Maemo 5 Linux operating system is currently serving Nokia with a second technology preview that is also available at this time.

Nokia is making support for Maemo and Symbian an attractive feature for Qt platform developers -- if, as promised, there is sufficient code base for both platforms. An additional Qt 4.6 highlight is multitouch support that allows development of applications for touch-enabled devices.

Performance enhancements were also mentioned. The largely reworked QGraphicsView rendering algorithm and a new OpenGL paint engine are evidence. The related cross-platform Qt Creator IDE in version 1.3 is now part of a Qt SDK. Nokia provides more details and downloads for Qt 4.6. As usual, an LGPL version and a commercial version are available, the latter targeted for commercial application development only.